How To Listen to Subscription Music on the Xbox 360

For almost a year now I have had access to thousands of songs and albums through the Rhapsody subscription service. I have also been able to transfer these subscription DRM’d tracks to my Sansa 280R mp3 player. One thing which has always bothered me was the lack of a way to listen to these files on my Xbox 360. The Sansa e280R uses the .rax extension by default which is incompatible with the xbox 360 for playing over a USB connection. This left streaming from my desktop as the only option, which for some reason stumped me for the longest time.

I recently figured out how to play DRM restricted rhapsody tracks by using the WMP 11 streaming to my Xbox 360. The solution is less than ideal because you need to download each track before it can be played on the Xbox 360. Check out the brief how to below.

1. First you need to be set up with a way to stream content to your Xbox 360(Microsoft).
2. Next you should have Rhapsody downloaded and installed.
3. Sign in to your Rhapsody account.
4. Click on the Tools Menu and Choose Preferences.
5. Click on “My Library”
6. Choose “Download Tracks to my Hard Drive”
7. Choose the file format, “WMA (Windows Media Audio)
8. Go ahead and save your settings, just a warning this will eat up Hard drive space on your streaming PC.
9. Find a song/album/playlist you want to be able to stream to the 360.
10. Right click the song(s) you want to download and stream, choose Download Track(s)
11. Now that the songs are downloaded to your computer in .WMA format open up Windows Media Player 11.
12. The default location for your downloaded files is My Documents\My Music\Rhapsody\youremail@domain.com
13. In Windows Media Player, Choose Add to Library and add the folder from step 12.
14. If you have already turned on File sharing you can now power up your xbox 360, hit the media tab and choose your computer. From there you have access to all the tracks you have downloaded.
15. You have to download the songs to the local hard drive for this to work!

A similar setup should work for Napster and Yahoo subscription services so long as you can download the DRM’d files to your streaming computer in .WMA format.

It is great to have access to all these tracks on the Xbox 360 without paying any more per month. It has always surprised me none of the subscription services has teamed up with Microsoft to offer this, though I am guessing it has something to do with bandwidth limitations.